« Think Globally Act Locally - Still Possible | Main | There Oughta Be A Law, Part 8325 »
Shame, Stupidity, and Fascism in the Senate
Watching the Bush/Republican assault on our liberties up close in the U.S. Congress is often simultaneously painful and absurd. I can no longer say, "almost beyond belief," because given the creeping fascism that is rotting out our democracy from inside, we move closer and closer to that terrible moment when nothing is beyond belief.
Outside the Dirksen Building this morning, I heard one of these stories from Ellen Taylor, whom I met at a Code Pink-sponsored demonstration of the waterboarding torture technique. She said that she had run into one of her Senators, John Cornyn of Texas on the elevator earlier in the day. She spoke with him about the war, and her visit the day before to Walter Reed Hospital, where she had met a young Texan who had lost a foot in Iraq. Cornyn assured her that everyone in Texas supported the war. After getting off the elevator, she walked to Cornyn's office, and left a two-line note in the visitor's book that Cornyn, like many Senators, keeps on a small table outside his office. She reminded him of their conversation, asked him to go to Walter Reed, and to bring the troops home. And she used a pink highlighter on the words Code Pink. Her entry was at the bottom of a page of a dozen or more other Texas visitors.
She started for the elevator, and then decided she should ask Cornyn to come to a party at her house to meet some Texans who were NOT in favor of the war. But when she opened the book to add the invitation, the page with her original comment was GONE.
She walked into the office, and asked one of the male receptionists what had happened to the page, and was told that her message about ending the war was unacceptable. When she proposed going back outside and simply putting in an invite to dinner, the receptionist quickly walked out into the hall, picked up the visitor's book, brought it back inside, and told her she could not put anything more in the book.
After listening to her story, I suggested she go back and ask to speak to the chief of staff to lodge a complaint about the rude and possibly illegal way she had been treated. (Remember, we taxpayers pay for everything in each Senator's office. If a Senator is going to maintain a public visitors' book, open to all constituents who stop by, and then starts censoring comments on the basis of their political content, there is a clear violation of at least the spirit of the First Amendment.--for those of you who still give a f**** about the Constitution). She asked me to go with her for support.
Back at the office, we approached the receptionist's desk, and she asked the book-yanker what his name was. Kyle. She then asked Kyle if she could speak to the chief of staff. Kyle hesitated for a second, and then disappeared into the inner office. We waited.
Five or six minutes went by. Suddenly a Capitol Police officer burst into the room, asking the remaining receptionist if there was a problem. I turned around, and several more officers pushed into the tiny space, with more officers waiting in the hall. They asked us to go outside, which we did. Then they wanted our drivers' licenses. By this time, there were 9 uniformed police on the scene, some inside and the rest ringed around us, blocking the hallway. All were breathing heavily, having run to the scene of this great crime. Now they wanted Social Security numbers, making it clear after a question that we would be arrested if we refused to provide the SSNs. The police were there because, they said, they had received a message that there was a "disturbance" in Cornyn's office.
There was some kind of activity going on in the background in the office. Several higher-ranking, or at least older, staffers had emerged into the reception room, and were talking with the officers inside, but with the office doors closed, we could hear nothing.
Finally yet another officer appeared, this one in plain clothes, representing the Intelligence arm of the Capitol Police, a division specifically detailed, as he explained, with "interfacing" between protesters of whatever stripe and the on-duty Capitol Police officers. He asked Ellen to tell him the whole story, which she proceeded to do. His presence seemed to be a signal to the uniformed police to start easing off on the tension.
In the meantime, the oldest-looking person yet had emerged from the back offices, (could it be a grown-up?) who turned out to be Beth Jafari, Cornyn's chief of staff. She came out, fairly composed, but said the police had come because Ellen had been yelling at the staff. Ellen replied that she was the wife of a preacher, was not in the habit of ever yelling at people in public, and had not yelled at anyone in the office.
Recognizing she was wrong-footed and that her poorly-trained staff was making her boss look bad, Jafari quickly backed off, never apologizing, but offering to put the original page back in the visitors' book, and explaining how to formally request a visit from the Senator.
As things slowly moved back toward what passes for normalcy, Ellen noticed that one of the policemen was holding a copy of the page from the visitors' book. She asked why, and was told that the page would go into a record for this "incident." She then asked, since the police were going to create a file with this document in it, for them to give her a copy for her own files, which the officer in charge said he would not do. Oh great, another stand-off, with the police taking yet another completely stupid and indefensible position.
Ellen then asked for a officer to accompany her back into Cornyn's office (God help her if she went back in there by herself!), to ask the hapless Kyle for a copy of the offending page. (I should note that in most Senate offices, the front-desk receptionist jobs are at, or very close, to the bottom of the pecking order, and are almost always occupied by people who are just out of college and who wake up each morning hoping to get off the front desk. But no one talks to more constituents, either by phone or in person, than these staffers, who in a well-disciplined office are trained to bend over backwards to be polite to every single person whom they encounter.)
Kyle, the only person who appears to have learned anything from this encounter, did not hesitate to walk out, get the book, make the copy, and give it to Ellen, thus bringing an end to the infamous Bloody Tuesday anti-war visitors' book defacing and police siege of Senator John Cornyn's Hart reception area.
Not that there were not larger games afoot elsewhere in the Senate this morning. Back in Dirksen, the Senate Judiciary Committee was about to go into session, voting soon after, thanks to the betrayal of Senator Schumer and Senator Feinstein, to put the Judiciary Committee on record as formally endorsing the use of torture by our country.
The committee could have insisted that it would not accept ANY nominee who could not unequivocally say what everyone else in the world already knows, that waterboarding is torture. Schumer and Feinstein are despicable cowards who have betrayed decent people everywhere in the world fighting to eliminate the use of torture by governments.
Yet in all this world of 6.5 billion people, when Senator Feinstein cast her vote, there was only one single voice who cried out, at the back of the hearing room, calling out "Shame," and within seconds the police had yanked him out the door and there was silence.
20 Comments
Leave a comment
Not registered? Click on 'Sign-in' above and then select 'Sign up' in the lower right corner. Don't forget to click on the link in the confirmation email that will be sent to your email address.
Every Texan supports the war?
Then why aren't more Texans going to the front lines, leaving the job to the blue state pinko commies?
If you support the war, but aren't willing to fight it yourself, you're no more than a chicken hawk.
And yes, Feinstein is a coward.
Remember that California is at best purple, and at worst bleeding red - and that the Republicans purposely refuse to run strong candidates against Feinstein, because Feinstein does their bidding so well.
It's Boxer that the Republicans want to get rid of. So far, Boxer has been resilient, but if the Governator runs against her in 2010, then all bets are off.
And no SSN = arrest?
What kind of assinine rule is that?
The law requires neither a government-issued ID nor an SSN to participate in American government - though you do need at least an SSN in order to work.
Apparently, the law is no more, because "national security" is so paramount.
Richard, It would be interesting to do a tally of all the money paid to all of those involved for the duration of this utter nonsense. I would object to a single dollar being wasted on such childishness. If your politicians can't cope with all points of view, they have no right standing for election. They have no right to squander your money like this.
Wow...Richard! I'm completely speechless.
I hope you are posting this all over and sending it to the newspapers.
Ditto, what sparrow said.
I'm speechless.
Hate to say it, but I blame these clamp-downs on the democratic leadership.
Carol,
I think you're right to a certain extent but not completely. For one thing, the incidences with Code Pink in the hearings is definitely the Dem. leadership's fault who do not want to look weak to their counterparts.
But in the case of Richard's story, this was a Republican's office and done with the intent to 'create their own story line of events' except that in this case, the story fell apart since she was a preacher's wife.
I think it's cases of individuals deciding to take on authority they don't have, and knowing they are likely to get by with it, in a political climate which is tolerant toward repression.
"Not my president" is right about a repressive environment creating a mindset in which people think they can get away with things. I would be very surprised if any Senator or senior staffer had ever told his or her staff, "If you see anything on our visitors' book from those Code Pink people, rip it out."
But we're living in a climate of fear. I just realized that Cornyn's visitors' book was out in the hall. Kyle would have had no reason to get up and read the entry, except that he must have noticed that Ellen was wearing a "pink" scarf. Pink! The most-hated color on Capitol Hill these days. Enough to get Kyle to leave his post at the phone to go out in the hall and check what the "pink" lady had written in the sacred book.
I can almost feel the rush of adrenaline he must have felt when he saw the very words, Code Pink, highlighted in pink, and an anti-war statement. The reptile brain goes into overdrive, "must defend the Senator, must protect over visitors from Texas from this vile intrusion, must take page out of book."
The fact that taking the page out of the book also removed the names of 10 or 12 other "loyal" Texans was irrelevant in the moment.
And besides, the pages weren't numbered, who would ever know that anyone from Code Pink had ever been there. Down the old Memory Hole, as Orwell would have put it.
And so it would have been, had Ellen not decided to go back.
No doubt Cornyn's office staff will be more circumspect about their future efforts at censoring the political views of his constituents.
But the mindset on display here is what is frightening. Erase a name here, deny a Freedom of Information request there, grab a person off the street and "rendit" her to some country where she's never heard from again, it's all cut from the same cloth.
I don't know - it just seems like the capitol police are more quick on the draw lately, as it were.
I don't imagine that is by accident.
Or maybe we're just hearing about it more, and this is how it always is?
No, it's worse.
It is not as bad as it could be--but it is definitely a result of high-running emotions on all sides. The police are pissed that they can't just haul us all off. We are pissed that we cannot count on peaceful protests.
I FORWARDED THIS STORY TO N.P.R. RADIO JUST NOW.
I will try to find out who is the NPR reporter who covers the Congress and leave them a message.
I just called "The Hill" website/magazine about the "incident" in Cornyn's office. The blog reporter said he was interested in it... maybe he will write something about it..
Ralph,
That's so cool that you contacted them. I hope they write about it.
I thought I had made progress just by getting the guy to read Dick Bell's article. I told him about DCP the website/gave him the URL. While he was on the phone with me, he started to read it. I think he said something like "it looks interesting".
Speaking of Constitution and rights, such as privacy, I heard the whistleblower from AT&T speak who will speak to the Senate and it was astounding.
They have secret rooms in 15 or so cities, AT&T alone, with big fiber optic trunk lines piping verbatim data from millions of people to National Security and they also have "semantic content" analysis going.
Saw more on it at TPM site but thought I had the link right here and don't - will drop it later.
Ralpheh
Try Mora Liason or Juan Williams. (I'm an NPR junkie - I depend on it alot since I don't watch tv at all & don't listen to radio which has commercials)
Ralpheh
Try Mora Liason or Juan Williams. (I'm an NPR junkie - I depend on it alot since I don't watch tv at all & don't listen to radio which has commercials)
@@@@@
I have called Liasson's office several times and she is either never there or never answers the phone. She is not covering Congress anyway now - she is covering the Big Banana - THE RACE FOR PRESIDENT. And frankly I distrust her reporting since she sold out to Fox News as a paid pundit.
I have had two nice discussions with NPR's Pentagon/ military reporter who generously talked with me about the Haditha killings and the comparisons with the My Lai massacre. He knew his stuff and had read both books on My Lai which I had been looking through (one book by a BBC correspondent is very good). We both agreed this incident/tragedy would make a great documentary movie or docudrama. I don't think it is generally known that the American helicopter pilot (accompanied by his gunner) who flew in and stopped the killing at My Lai was, many years later, finally awarded the medal of valor.
I believe NPR's Congress reporter is Debbie Elliot - but they keep changing.. sometimes it is Linda Werthheimer or others...
Try them
Try Steve Inskeep - he's a big banana but wouldn't it be nice?!